David Thang Moe

David Thang Moe, PhD, is a residential scholar in religion and Southeast Asian studies at Yale University and co-chair of the religion in Southeast Asia unit at the American Academy of Religion. He holds associate and fellowship positions at the Harvard Asia Center and Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs, and also serves as an adjunct professor of religion and Asian studies at the University of Connecticut. From 2022 to 2025, he served as the Henry H. Rice Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Religion and Southeast Asian Studies at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Department of Religious Studies, where he played a vital role in advancing scholarship on the region.

His research and teaching focus on the intersections of identity politics, religion, colonialism, nationalism, ethnic conflict, civil war, decentralized resistance, ethnic reconciliation, political theology, and interreligious engagement in Southeast Asia, its Zomia-Borderlands, and Diasporas. He has taught a range of interdisciplinary courses across Yale departments—
including History, Political Science, Religious Studies, Ethnicity, Race & Migration, the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the Divinity School. One of his popular course, Religion, Politics, and Identity in Asia, has been praised by students as “their favorite class at Yale.” Drawing on both firsthand experience and deep intellectual reflection, his teaching and research have been featured in prominent outlets such as Voice of America, Asia News, Yale News, Yale Daily News, and others.

Moe is the author of Beyond the Academy: Lived Asian Public Theology of Religions (Princeton Theological Monograph Series, Wipf & Stock, 2024), now translated into Burmese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Bahasa Indonesia. He is currently working on his next monograph, Beyond Buddhist Nationalism: The Politics of Interreligious and Decentralized Resistance after the Coup (under review with Oxford University Press). His other ongoing projects include Beyond Imagined Communities: Reimagining Religious and Racial Identities and Reconciliation in Southeast Asia (with a proposal invited by Cambridge University Press) and a collaborative, APARRI grant-winning project Unlocking the Hidden Stories of Burmese American Christian Identity Imagination, which explores how Burmese American Christians — who hated Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar — imagine their identities in the context of white Christian nationalism.

Moe is a highly sought-after speaker on religion and Burmese politics at several leading universities across North America, Europe, and Asia—including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, BU, NYU, GWU, Stanford, Toronto, Oxford, Cambridge, Hamburg, ANU, NUS, Yonsei, Ewha, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, among others.
As a public intellectual, he has also met with US Senators in Washington, DC, to advocate for Myanmar’s democracy, and has addressed large public gatherings at Times Square in New York. Born, raised, and educated in an isolated village in Myanmar, and now based at Ivy League, Moe is deeply passionate about bridging the gap between grassroots and academic voices.